>Another day in boot camp

Day three of the USSTAG training camp in Colorado Springs started with a bit of a shock when we woke up to see snow falling! After a hearty breakfast, we met in the conference room for another great talk with Bob Seebohar, our nutritionist, about eating right while at a regatta and on the road.

After Bob’s talk, an executive decision was made to cancel the “Incline” in the afternoon. It was snowing pretty hard and the temperatures were in the 30s, so I think everyone understood that it wasn’t worth the risk to forge ahead with it. It was kind of a bummer, but we’ll try again in the spring.

So instead, we headed to the gym for our third type of workout: a “regatta-mode” workout. This one was a lot lighter, but effective to complement our sailing during events. Chris Herrera pulled the Laser sailors who are here– Paige Railey, Charlie Buckingham, and myself–over to the side and put us through a challenging 20 minute sprint ab workout. We did some ab workouts that I didn’t even know existed!

After a lunch break, it was back to the gym for some boat-specific workouts. There’s no doubt that time in the boat is the most effective way to train, but when you can’t be in the boat, it’s important to know some good exercises that you can do in the gym. We broke up into different groups by class to come up with all different types of exercises to replicate what we do in the boat. For the Lasers, we came up with a hiking bench with a strap, some bands, a weight jacket, etc to focus on the hiking muscles. Then we explored some balancing exercises on bosu balls to work on downwind stability. It’s pretty amazing that with a little creativity in the gym you can do some great sailing workouts.

When the workouts were done, we grabbed a quick snack and met back in the conference room for one final talk with Bob Seebohar and then a presentation by Dana Paxton titled “How to Intimidate Your Competition With Social Media” which was pretty cool. We broke for dinner and rounded out the day with a little team basketball.

So it was another filled day here in Colorado Springs. I think I speak for everyone when I say that we’re all working really hard and are pretty spent. These camps truly are a four day boot camp!